The University of Edinburgh’s internet services suffered a “significant IT incident,” for approximately 24 hours on Friday, September 27.
The outage affected MyEd, a third-party program used by the university for nearly every aspect of student life, including submitting assessments and paying student fees.
MyEd serves as a hub from which students access third-party software such as email and personalized class schedules, both of which remained intermittently unavailable during the outage.
Students first became aware the outage was widespread in the early afternoon when an administrator in the Main Library announced the news over the P.A system.
Shortly afterwards, Vice-Principal Harmon sent an email to the student body which explained the situation and promised to work towards a resolution.
He confirmed the incident was not the result of a cyberattack.
Titaan, a first-year student, told The Student that:
“Basically it meant that I couldn’t access the readings and also for the tutorial I couldn’t access the exercises.” But “to be honest, it didn’t bother me that much.”
Jemma, a third-year exchange student was attending a lecture when she first became aware of the outage.
She said to The Student that:
“[Her professor] couldn’t access the slideshow presentation because MyEd was down, so she spent about 15 minutes trying to find a way to access it without MyEd and couldn’t do it.”
By noon on Saturday September 28, MyEd was once again functional.